Pilbara: an industrial sacrifice zone

Since then the gathering momentum of fossil capitalism has treated the Peninsula as an industrial sacrifice zone, scarring the silent terrain with roads, infrastructure corridors, pipeways, power lines and quarries. One of the world’s largest ammonia plants squats in the floodway between Hearsons Cove and the ruined landscape of King Bay, one cyclone away from a public health catastrophe.

Until recently, the highest point on the landscape has been the flare tower on the Woodside plant, but all that is about to change.

Despite a hard fought campaign by local activists, traditional owners, rock art conservators and a cross-party alliance of MPs, in 2007 the Western Australian Government signed off on a massive new gas plant - Woodside’s Pluto Project. The Federal Government stood back and watched, declaring the whole Archipelago a National Heritage property while agreeing that specified leases should still be blasted flat for more heavy industry. As elsewhere in Australia, Indigenous voices were silenced by a combination of poverty, overwhelm and recondite legal agreements removing their right to public dissent, which makes their continued resistance all the more extraordinary.

Pluto is being bulldozed into existence on the northern flank of the Peninsula, on an artificial plateau that will be visible for miles in every direction. Forever hereafter, the ancient Burrup will be dominated by this architecture, when at the stroke of a pen the WA Government could have demanded that Woodside locate their plant on the flat coastal plain that stretches for hundreds of kilometres in either direction.

The Burrup’s growing supporters are now gathering their strength to fight for the relocation of an avalanche of new development proposals: a quarry expansion; a huge explosives plant; another gas plant to handle Woodside’s Browse field; an energy hungry desalination plant.

It is no coincidence that Karratha’s economy has been pushed past breaking point - it is simply impossible for a town to expand fast enough to accommodate this breakneck pace of construction.

These “developments” are the logical conclusion of an economic mindset that seems determined to liquidate Australia’s non-renewable resources as fast as possible. Unless sanity prevails and we transition toward a conserver economy, within a generation we will have drained the north-west gas fields, stripped the Pilbara of its ancient ironstone resources and permanently ruined the Burrup.

Karratha’s survival at this point would be an open question: a visit to the spooky Goldfields ghost towns should be mandatory for anyone contemplating the future of the Pilbara under our present development model.

Even posing these questions is likely to see us accused of being blindly anti-development, but in fact we are only against blind development. At this pace, there will be nothing for the children of the Pilbara to inherit.

So let’s get emergency housing resources into Karratha to help people out of the caravan park. While we’re at it we also need to take a good hard look at where this rollercoaster ride is taking us, and whether it might not be a good idea to apply the brakes while we still can.